“No one would follow me anywhere,” Nico said. It sounded like a statement of fact, but it also sounded like it hurt.
“So what, a series of fights to the death as the family rips itself apart?”
Nico smiled again. “Nonna.”
Mateo looked at him as if he were truly insane. “She’s eighty-five or somewhere around there.” There were several birthdays when her age hadn’t changed, so now everyone was confused.
“And she’s led the pack the whole time. Oh, she’s given up the power to your wolf. She thinks that’s how things should be—a man at the top—but it’s always been her. It’s the twenty-first century. A woman can lead a pack. A woman always has.”
Mateo felt like someone had stolen his chair from under him. Nonna had always been alpha? It was true, she always had the last word and his wolf had let her. Mateo had never questioned why. Who but her could have sent him off to the wilds of Colorado like that was a sane thing to do?
“She’s got another decade in her, and by that point Jackson will be of age or somebody else will have stepped up,” Nico said.
Jackson was almost a teenager, the last child born with a wolf, and an insanely strong one.
Mateo shuddered.
“What?”
“The Amato pack is going to be led by a guy named Jackson?”
Nico snickered. “I told Rosie she was an idiot.”
Mateo shook his head, in love with his family again. “And my lone wolf sits in the middle of the woods? You think that’s not going to send it stark raving insane?”
“With the love of your life? And little wolf babies running around?”
A bolt of longing struck him so hard he couldn’t breathe.
“What about the business?” the stubborn, idiot part of his brain insisted.
Nico held up his hands. “Do you think Nonna could learn how to use a computer?”
Mateo burst out laughing, the first time since long before he got back. It felt jarring and deeply good.
“This isn’t about the woman in the woods,” Nico said. “I mean, you can make it about her. I don’t care. If she is the excuse you need to break the bars of this cage you built around yourself out of some weird-ass combination of love and loyalty, I’ll take it. But it’s not about her. It’s time to get out. We did not want this for you.”
Mateo picked up his phone.
“Meeting is over?” Niko said.
“Get out of my office.”
Nico stood up and headed for the door with a self-satisfied smirk on his face.
“Nico,” Mateo called.
The larger man turned, one eyebrow raised.
“Thank you.”
“Never needed. Let me know when the jet is leaving.”
“Why?” Mateo blinked. “Wait, you’re coming?”
Of course, he was coming. Mateo had never seen such a transformation. Nico’s wolf was happy in the woods.
He had a sudden vision of that house full of wolves and her walking so tentatively down the stairs.
